I switched to electronics engineering
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
841–850 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#842Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even Facebook. I think the last time bespoke restaurant menu websites were a viable business was around 2010.
That doesn't agree with my area at all. Most restaurants have menus or an app or both. Some have a basic website with phone number and link to an app. There seems to be some kind of app template many restaurants use which you can order from too.
> I think the last time bespoke restaurant menu websites
> There seems to be some kind of app template many restaurants use which you can order from too.
I think you agree with the comment you are replying to, but glossed over the word bespoke. IME as a customer in a HCOL area a lot of restaurants use a white-label platform for their digital menu. They don't have the need or expertise to maintain a functional bespoke solution, and the white-label platform lends familiarity and trust to both payment and navigation.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#843Nothing. A tool that is only right ~60% of the time is still useless.
I've yet to have an LLM ever produce correct code the first time, or understand a problem at the level of anything above a developer that went through a "crash course".
If we get LLMs trained on senior level codebases and senior level communications, they may stand a chance someday. Given that they are trained using the massively available "knowledge" sites like Reddit, it's going to be awhile.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#844Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day. LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be ea…
> LLMs don't write code like that As someone who has been doing this since the mid 80's in all kinds of enterprise environments, I am finding that the latest generation are getting rather good at code like that, on par with mid-senior level in that way. They are also very capable of discussing architecture approaches with an encyclopaedic knowledge, although humans contribute meaningfully by drawing connections and a…
That sounds like they need a Unix plug-in pipe approach creating small modules that do one thing well handing their result without caring where it goes to the next not caring where it came from module while the mother Llm overseas only all the Blackbox connection pipes with the complex end result as a collateral divine conception.
now there was someone that I could call king
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#845Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
This is satire, right? The completely off-topic mentioning of your graphics programming skills, the overconfidence, the phrase "delve into"... Let me guess: The prompt was "Write a typical HN response to this post"
This made me chuckle. But at the same time a bit uneasy because this could mean my own way of expressing myself online might've been impacted by reading too much AI drivel whilst trying to find signal in the noisy internet landscape...
The off-topic mentioning of graphics programming was because I tend to type as I think, then make corrections, and as I re-read it now the paragraph isn't great. The intent was to give an example of how I keep myself sharp, and challenging what many consider "settled" knowledge, where graphics programming happens to be my most recent example.
For what it's worth, English isn't my native language, and you'll have to take my word for it that no chat bots were used in generating any of the responses I've made in this thread. The fact that people are already uncertain about who's a human and who's not is worrisome.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#846Simply, as LLM capabilities increase, writing code might disappear, but building products will remain for much longer.
If you enjoy writing code, you might have to make it a hobby like gardening, instead of earning money from it.
But the breed of startup founder (junior and senior) that’s hustling for the love of building a product that adds value to users, will be fine.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#847Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bird can fly to moon if it keeps on improving every month.
it literally cannot though, unless it becomes some other form of life that doesn't need oxygen, that's the whole thing with this analogy, it's ironically suited to the discourse
It would need to:
* Survive without oxygen
* Propel itself without using wings
* Store enough energy for the long trip and upkeep of the below
* Insulation that can handle the radiation and temperature fluctuations
* Have a form of skin that can withstand the pressure change from earth to space and then the moon
* Have eyes that don't pop while in space
It would need to become something literally extraterrestrial that has not evolved in the 3.7b+ years prior.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, but if evolution ever got there that creature would be so far removed from a bird that I don't think we'd recognize it :p
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#848Earlier quoted context omitted.
If an LLM can give you feedback on a way to proceed it sounds more like you might be the junior? :P LLMs seems to be ok'ish at solving trivial boilerplate stuff. 20 attempts deep I have not yet seen it able to even remotely solve anything I have been stuck enough on to have to sit down and think hard.
Curious: what kind of problem domain to you work on? I use LLMs every day on pretty hard problems and they are always net positive. But I imagine they’re not well trained on material related to your work if you don’t find them useful.
What kind of problem domain do you work on?
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#849Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in a leadership role and one of the primary parties responsible for hiring. So code passing my sniff test is kind of important.
To bring it back to the question that spawned the ask: One thing to future proof a career as a SWE is to get into business and leadership/management as well as learning how to program. If you're indispensable to the business for other reasons, they'll keep you around.
in that case the conversation is still kind of missing the forest for the trees, yes your career will be safer if you get into management but thats not going to play for everyone. Mathematically, it cant, not every engineer can go be a manager. What Im interested in is the stories of the people who arent going to make it.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#850Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are assuming I am arrogant because I don't view the current LLMs as good coders. That's a faulty assumption so your argument starts with a logical mistake. Also I never said that I "have no equal". I am saying that the death of my career has been predicted for no less than 10 years now and it still has not happened, and I see no signs of it happening; LLMs produce terrible code very often. This gives me the right…
"You seem to confuse" "Your analogy with the automakers seems puzzlingly irrelevant" "Your take is rather romantic." That's pretty charged language focused on the person not the argument, so if you're surprised why I'm annoyed, start there. Meta has one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08806 Another, edited in above: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multi-repo-ai-assisted-refact... Another: https://codescene.com/product/ai-…
Too bad the Grit.io guy doesn’t use his considerable resources to learn how to enunciate clearly.
Or build an AI agent to transform his speech into something more understandable.